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Anyone who is a fan of the BattleStar Galactica Universe will know that, aside from the cringe worthy delay before the final season, there will be a feature length movie aired in the US at the end of November. It turns out 'flashbacks' (read 2 min previews) are available on SciFi's website but are only available to US ip ranges. Never fear, some friendly person has uploaded them all to youtube for those of us outside the US. However I must say I am disappointed, I found them rather reminiscent of the Webisodes at the end of season 2 - disconnected and lacking in any excitement, particularly in the new Adama's voice acting.

Whilst at least the webisodes were referred to and built on by the first few episodes of season 3, since this movie is set ~4,000 days into the First Cylon war, it is unlikely that it will bring anything new to the table with regards season 4. Although the secret weapon that is hinted at is quite a tasty idea which could potentially be linked into BSG Season 4. I am still very much looking forward to seeing the movie when I can here in the UK, however I wont be watching any more of these Razer flashbacks as they are not adding very much, particularly if they are snippets of the movie, I would sooner wait and see the whole thing in its entirety rather than have sections or the ending ruined. Roll on Razer and I can't wait for Season 4!!!

So it appears the delightfully peculiar (but awesome) Stephen Fry has started his own blog. By the looks of things he will be 'blessaying' about gadgets and other Fryish trivia. It is strange to think of Stephen Fry as a celebrity - after all, he just humbly gets on with the job, providing witty satirical entertainment rather than having a fan base of screaming morons and making an ass out of himself. In this modern age of A (to H) list so called 'celebrities,' it is a refreshing change to see someone who unassumingly is so unfazed and unspoilt by the lime light while still retaining his character, which is almost its own subtle brand. Indeed, its hard to read his blog without his hearing his voice in the back of your head.

What he has posted so far is a lot of fun to read and I wish him all the best on this latest endeavour.

Image source

At the risk of annoying all the blog syndicators I ping to when I update (ok... 2) I just had to write a brief post about the Crysis demo. It is simply stunning, but you already knew that. What is more impressive is that a user called LennyRhys found a very simple modification which allows most of the Dx10 effects on Dx9 Hardware or in Dx9 mode.

[quote from original thread]

I'm one of the few VERY happy people in the crysis community at the moment. I ran the game with everything high at 1680x1050 and it looks awesome, very playable, no lag.

C2D E6750

Gigabyte P35 DS4

2GB OCZ Platinum 800MHz

Nvidia GF 8800GTX

All at stock

If you tweak the configuration files in \CVarGroups\ by copying and pasting the "very high" settings (1st paragraph) IN PLACE of the "high" settings (last paragraph) the game will load the highest possible settings even though the drop-down menus display "high.". The difference between "high" settings and the tweaked settings is immense: shadows are deeper, more realistic; the leaves have better reflective properties, better textures; the colours are better; and the level of detail is simply stunning.

[/quote]

The whole thing is reminiscent of the CellFactor: Revolution mod. According to the developer, the game would only run with a AEGIA PhysX card. A modification was quickly found which allowed it to be played in software with most of the 'snazzy' new features. Here are a selection of images from the thread, as you can see, this minor modification makes the game look even more stunning...

 

Woohoo! Today I breached the four thousand unique visitor mark! I just want to say a big thank you to you, my visitors - without your constant patronage I wouldn't have any enthusiasm to update.

Also, I now have both RSS () and email () notification of my new posts. In order to receive RSS updates you will need a suitable RSS reader - nice list here. The way it works is, everytime I post something new, a new entry is put in my rss feed which is automatically loaded by your RSS software. This then gives you a brief synopsis of the story giving you the option to visit my site and read more. Email notification is simpler (as it only requires an email account) and is handled by Feedblitz on my behalf. This means you do not have to worry about your email address falling into the hands of spammers because the only person that stores it is Feedblitz. They have an established privacy policy and millions of people who use them daily.

For either of these options, click on the envelope or rss icon on my side bar.

I had forgotten how much fun playing multiplayer games with people in the same room is. Playing online is a lot of fun, but when you know the people and watch their reactions as you play makes it all the more exhilarating. That coupled with the potential for humiliation greatly adds to the experience.

The games played were : Star Trek Tactical Assualt and Ace Combat X on the PSP. StarTrek was a lot of fun but suffered from serious glitching in multiplayer. Player positions were completely all over the place with people being 300+ distance away from where they were on the other person's PSP. Ace Combat X was a lot of fun particularly 1v1 dog fights, bloody Fenrirs...

Also played was Goldeneye and Starcraft. Prior to this I had not played Starcraft in about two years and I must say, after a few hours of play I am convinced that if all Blizzard do with Starcraft 2 is update the graphics, it will STILL be an excellent game. I still remember playing it almost ten years ago when multiplayer involved dialling my friend's modem using my computer using a 33.6kbps connection.... laggy times. It was one of the first games to have completely asynchronous factions and is still a huge amount of fun to play, although its shocking how quickly the hours shoot past when playing it...

I have known about the openbios / linuxbios project for a little while now, but today I discovered a video demonstrating an early build running on a standard 2Mb flash EEPROM. Not only does it completely replace the standard Award BIOS but it boots to a graphical (if lightweight) X11 server in just a few seconds. Although this project is still fairly new (shown by limited compatibility) the concept of having a unified, free bios that allows fast prebooting into a graphical environment is appealing. I believe Macs do something similar, they boot into a very stripped down GUI giving graphical boot options. This idea is not new and ASUS demonstrated a couple of weeks back a motherboard that has an embedded linux distribution ready to boot before windows. The technology is called Splashtop and allows access to email, skype and the web from a stripped down linux environment.

More and more I am seeing a trend towards 'at-an-arms-length' computing and I have mixed feelings about it. Whilst linuxbios would allow better / more efficient booting into a Linux (or other OS) distribution, having a stripped down environment where you could then VNC or telnet into another more powerful system is an interesting idea with lots of potential applications. Imagine a media center PC that was fast (as in instant) to boot and silent due to all the processing being done on another machine on the network, it would be an ideal mediacenter environment. Similarly there is a low murmuring that has been increasing in volume for the last few years concerning a complete shake up of the traditional computing environment. It essentially started with web '2.0' i.e. applications as a service. The whole idea of being able to log into a personalised environment in a web browser is an appealing one, be it a web operating system like eyeOS or just a social networking environment like Facebook. Not only can you have access to your personal space/files/environment remotely, but instead of buying a powerful machine and maintaining its software and hardware, buying a thin client and computing entirely online. Many people simply do not have the technical expertise or the time to properly maintain their home computers. Simple tasks such as regular defragmentations or temporary file cleanup and data archiving often are not done regularly. Many computers I see do not even have basic security programs running. A secure thin client running on a whitelist basis would not need such constant attention and any security would be handled remotely by the application provider. Potentially providers could offer really cheap, low power machines with a monthly payment, which would serve as a lease for an online operating system and storage space.

Although there are potentially a lot of benefits, there is something about relying entirely on a network that is outside your control, (the Internet) a service provider that could have a dubious privacy policy (look at AT&T) and a locked down client which does not appeal to me. I have very much bought into the F/OSS philosophy and the concept of being locked into a proprietary system does not appeal at all, let alone relying on a foreign (i.e. outside my home system) network - especially with my ISP's service record.

"The chemicals [in the iphone] are suspected of causing birth defects and gender-bending effects."

According to the article from the Independent, the iPhone contains several classes of compounds not known to play well with the environment or the human body. Among them are phthalates (?) which are cheifly emplyed as plasticisers and used to lower the glass transition temperature (Tg) of plastics making them more durable. I dont fully believe all the effects claimed in the article, but it makes for an entertaining read.

Full Article

Well I promised a few posts ago I would outline how to glitch the facility map so as to remove Ourmov. I thought everyone knew about this glitch but as I read through more and more sites I could not find any mention of it. So, here is the video - be kind to me, this is my first submission to youtube :)

Well I went to Electroworkz yesterday for the first time in many weeks. It was great fun as always and I have a couple of nice welts on the top of my head for good measure.  I have re-uploaded all the airsoft galleries but unfortunately they are still on the old template. I don't have the time at the moment to sort them out but I will do soon. With regards to photos from yesterday, the few I took are here and there are also some more on Arine's Airsoft forums on this thread.

**Note - another site has gone down shortly after me posting a link to it. I think my site is cursed. I will update the link when Arnies completes their DB check.

I noticed a post on a blog I read - The AT wire, that a new Simpsons game is in production. Being a junkie for anything Matt Groening creates, I am eagerly awaiting this release. For now, here is the youtube video.

In my usual excellent timing, the website hosting the programs I have written about below (http://www.rarewitchproject.com/), has just gone down. They are presently working on a site wide redesign. Will update when site comes back up. Sorry about this

Update 2: The site is now back up. Enjoy the redesigned goodness - http://www.rarewitchproject.com

Following on from the post a few days back - I have found a number of programs that help customise goldeneye. Not only can new single player levels be made and played (in emulator OR console) but all the levels have been unlocked and can be played in multiplayer.

The first utility has been out for a little while now - Goldeneye Full Face Mapper.

This program allows you to replace any texture in Goldeneye - from the wall / decals to smoke and even faces. This is a feature that RARE had completed and intended to be released with Perfect Dark but didnt due to legal concerns. Now, with a little tweaking you can change all the faces of the built in bad guys in Goldeneye.

Update: SubDragon from Rarewitch project emailed to let me know that this tool is no longer required as the goldeneye setup editor v2.1 can do this as well. Its still useful for a quick and dirty tweak however.

The second program is the most impressive - it is called the Goldeneye Setup Editor.

This is the second version of this program. The first was released in 2005 but everything had to be done manually in hex codes and as a result I didnt get anywhere with this. The new version allows for visual editing of levels and object placement and is highly recommended. It allows anything to be changed, from the missions to the placement of enemies / objects. Several user created levels are already available and range from retweaked original levels to completely new maps.

Example of Goldeneye multiplayer using G5 building from Perfect Dark

A video of a new single player level : Library

Example of a retweaked Runway level:

The site that streams Beyond The Red Line's videos appears to be down for maintenance I found the sign rather amusing.

Also the season 4 BSG trailer is up on you tube I simply cannot wait for the new season. The end of season 3 was so different and shocking it took me a good few hours to digest what we discovered about the Cylons and 4 of the final 5. Absolutely amazing TV!

I must admit to being a huge Battlestar Galactica fan, so imagine my delight when I discovered a community project to make a space combat game from the same universe! It combines some of my favourite words - community and game but the best thing is that it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. The controls are complicated, as not only do you have traditional control over propulsion (e.g. thrust and 'flaps') but also manoeuvring thrusters as well. This means it takes quite a while to get adjusted and I can hear Starbuck berating me in the back of my head every time I muck up a turn. I am such a frakking nugget at the moment in this game at the moment. The Cylon raiders are every bit as dangerous as they are portrayed on TV, twisting, ducking diving making it very difficult to destroy, even in a one on one battle. There have been times when I have had an AI Cylon raider in my sights but the damn thing kept twisting and turning around asteroids making it extremely difficult to kill. There are a few issues with the game which are caused by the engine on which the game is based. Occationally there are graphical clipping errors on the asteroids but on the whole these are pretty small issues.

>

The only draw back is that you really need to use a game pad to play this game properly, preferably one with a lot of buttons although there is a lot of talk on the forums of people quite happily using a keyboard and mouse. The number of single player missions is currently a bit limited but that is mostly because only a short demo has been released. Multiplayer on the other hand is fully implemented thanks to it being based on an open source port of Freespace2 and is a lot of fun with several teams having cropped up.

This is definitely one to check out and bookmark, if their future release builds on the demo, it will rival several recent commercial games.

BtRL Videos:

Thanks to Simon for help proofing.

I was randomly looking for a quote from Goldeneye (the movie) on youtube last night when I discovered a collection of videos showing the various fun things you can do with a bit of gamesharking. The kind of things you can do are really impressive, for example, the first few preview pictures show dual wielding of weapons but with the actor camera angle / height changed. Whilst this looks excellent with dual magnums, two RPC90s or KF7s look a little weird. Did someone say gigantism? From guards that don't fit in the dam level to enormous remote mines.

One of the more fun alterations was changing the default actor model from the standard Russian guard to Natalia or the scientist models. Still more entertaining was Sean Bean replaced by a Goldeneye satellite which walked around the end of the facility level. There appeared to be several codes which just made the default soldiers go crazy, from shooting at right angles to the player to shooting at the idiot with the box on his head. The final six pictures showed multiplayer fun from levels which definitely were not included as official multiplayer maps (train, dam, cradle and depot.)

I discovered a glitch that could be exploited on the facility level many years ago. I never posted it online as I though everyone else knew about it, but recently I discovered no mention of it anywhere on the official Goldeneye fan sites. It is simple enough to do. When at the end of Facility, talk to Alec but get close to the door. Immediately when the alarm sounds, run through the door into the lab area. Ourmov WILL NOT spawn, meaning you can return to the bottling room and shoot at guards to your hearts content. Alec will even help you.  I will post a video guide to this (although its trivial to perform) soon.

Gameshark Videos:

Part 1,2,3,4,5,6,7

With many exciting releases either on the way (*buntu, MEPIS ) or already here (Mandriva) I find myself trying desperately to switch my primary OS to one of these flavors. The problem is, at the moment, I cannot run Linux as a standalone operating system without at least dual booting with windows XP. Whilst my hardware at the moment is (almost)completely supported by modern Linux my massive upgrade, which is just over the horizon, would likely prevent me from running a Linux OS with full hardware acceleration. I believe this is a problem that many gamers face and I can not see any solution presently. The problem lies in one of the main uses of my PC - gaming.

I play a lot of games and as such, migrating away from an operating system like XP or Vista is a bad idea. Even though quite a few games (Doom 3, America's Army etc) have Linux builds, most games do not. Whilst API compatibility projects such as WINE are making excellent progress, it is generally not sufficient to play modern (i.e. newly released) games properly and with no performance hit. The major sticking point is graphics card drivers. Whilst these are reasonably mature for nVidia, ATi drivers (both binary and to an extent the fglx ones) are substandard. For years ATi has been promising new and improved drivers but at the moment this has not happened. Whilst I was going to have a rant about support of new graphics cards, I am pleasantly surprised to find much improved support in recently announced drivers.

An option of course, is to goto Linux and buy a Xbox 360 / PS3. Whilst I think the simplicity of putting a disc in and playing a game (just like that - no OS, no configuring graphics and tweaking for your hardware etc) is great and a breath of fresh air, the lack of openness in a console environment massively puts me off. I like being able to make my own maps / models etc for games I play. More to the point, some of the most enjoyable games I have played recently have been total conversion mods - something not accommodated for in a console environment like Beyond the red line - a BattleStar Galactica mod. You only have to see the difference a few user made mods make to Oblivion to want to play it all over again.

(image source)(title icon source)

Just a quick post tonight. I was busy reading and exploring the web (as usual) when I came across this excellent portrayal of Jack Thompson. In case you don't know Mr Thompson, he is a conservative Christian lawyer from Florida who believes the root of evil in our society stems from violent video games. He has sued retailers and run various campaigns to ban various computer games. Well the gamers at Extra life (with the help of our friend Adobe Mischief-shop) decided to let their feeling be known about this individual.

Image Credit - http://www.myextralife.com

Is anyone else starting to get concerned about the Storm Bot net? This is a topic that seems to have avoided mass media interest, despite having first cropped up in January this year. There are a number of factors which make this worm very different from prior such outbreaks. Up to now, worms would spread as fast and far as they could in order to achieve maximum power and publicity before activating a payload. This historically has been in the form of DDOS attacks. What makes storm so dangerous, is that it appears to be extremely well coded. Once a windows machine is infected, it silently joins the pool without any overt signs to the end user. The way in which the worm spreads also makes it hard to both detect and provide an effective countermeasure against as the worm's code changes twice an hour as well as its constantly evolving social engineering based attacks. Users have been lured with offers of free music or emails purportedly to be emergency notifications of a dangerous weather front in Europe. In fact the name of the worm comes from those initial emails.

Each infected node communicates with others via a specially designed peer to peer network, rather than a single central server and each node can function independently should it need to. It is hard to get an estimate as to the number of infected clients are present throughout the world. Estimates vary wildly from 50-70 thousand to 1 to 50 million. Think of the bandwidth this worm not has available and how devastating such a DDOS would be. In the past DDOS attacks, when not virus related, came from a fairly narrow range of IPs allowing the targeted systems to block provinces or even continents of IP addresses. Whilst this would render the site completely inaccessible from genuine users in those areas, at least the site could provide partial service to other areas of the globe. With Storm, there does not appear to be a way to defend against an onslaught on such diverse scale given the world wide distribution of infected clients. Worryingly the bot net has not yet been very active, experts estimate it as running at around 10% capacity with a small number of nodes (tens of thousands only) spreading the infection and other nodes either dormant or sending out spam messages. It is conceivable that over ten billion spam messages have been sent already. There are signs the bot net has been retaliating against efforts to halt its progress with several sites either being hacked or suffering DDOS attacks.

Whilst I do not wish this post to sound like I am scaremongering for the sake of a post, I am genuinely concerned as to the lack of public knowledge / media attention on this matter. Whilst a google search of 'Storm Botnet' will yield a fair amount of information, a conversation with several of my informed friends revealed very little in the way of awareness. Certainly for me, a bot with purportedly enough power to wipe countries off the Internet is a cause for concern as it should be every windows PC user.

So as any returning visitor will note, I have implemented a blog formating to this site. I did this because the majority of what I post will be in the form of topic news items / blog posts. As such it made no sense just taking on new entry after new entry and silently archiving old posts where noone would ever see them again. Whilst that still might happen with this system, at least it is easier to view previous posts by category / date. I will be transitioning everything over to the new blog format given a couple of days.

The software I am using is completely free and open source, as such I would like to say thank you to the developers by pointing it out to people who might be thinking about starting their own blog. Its called Thingamablog and it has a whole host of cool features and a good support forum. The only thing I dislike is the ping function, which alerts a blog resource (default is weblog.com) when a blog is updated. Whilst this is actually quite a nice idea, the site in question is being hammered by spammers which makes it completely defunct sadly.

I was a bit disappointed to discover the 7.10 release of ubuntu wont be officially out until the middle of the month. However the team are making solid progress with a lot of new features now implemented. It leaves me with mixed feelings, seeing the long list of new gadgets and fancy things the new release will have as per default. Whilst I love the idea of Beryl/Compiz window managers installed and ready to use on first bootup, along with several features like fast user switching and the search appbar, it makes me wonder what kind of performance hit we are going to see with the default installation compared to 7.04.

It all feels highly reminiscent of Vista and I really do hope that I am wrong in this prediction. I have been toying, not quite switching over, to ubuntu since 5.04 and overall I think the project is going from strength to strength, however the number of bugs and issues that were still present, even in 7.04 makes me wonder why these little bugs / gaps in the interface are not the primary focus of this new release. Whilst many of the improvements Gnome 2.20 adds to this release will be met with enthusiasm, I can't work out why a good portion of their development time is spent working on their PIMs (e.g. Evolution mail client and Epiphany web browser.) Not all the PIM programs are like this though, there are some that seem genuinely useful and important to have in a good window manager. Given the massive use of firefox and mozilla, in my opinion, some of these default programs seem more like wordpad, IE and Outlook Express (now Mail in Vista.) Sure they have some user base, but for a lot of people, they are the first programs to be replaced either by Microsoft or Mozilla offerings. Perhaps it would make sense for these programs to be spun off to allow the core dev team to work on the more pressing issues with Gnome. I am not, however, advocating removing these programs from official distributions of Gnome as this would leave a gap for end users who just want Ubuntu to work without hassle. Sadly I am not experienced (or Gutsy enough) with Linux to install a bleeding edge version (like 7.10 tribes 4) - I will have to be patent a little while longer and I guess if I don't like it I can just move my favoritism over to another distribution. I love Linux  

There have been numerous reports of Apple going through with their thinly veiled threat of bricking modified iphones. From a purely corporate prospective it actually makes a lot of sense; given that Apple receive a cut of every AT&T subscriber’s bill. From a consumer standpoint, assuming it is not just a malicious attempt but a legitimate case of damage from the modification, it is a real case of corporate arrogance. My mind goes back to a few years back when some shareware writers included malicious routines to be executed if they detected a known pirated key being used to register the program. Lets face it, it was a bad idea then (all the user base legitimate and illegitimate lost complete faith in the product and the, albeit small, company went under.) Whilst this is a lot less serious (after all a program is not maliciously deleting your documents) and probably perfectly legally justified (under an illegal modification clause) it is still a brazen move likely to illicit some very real type of backlash. There is already a call for a class action suite against Apple, whether this gains any real traction or not remains to be seen. However, the worst affected in this is actually future buyers of iPhones. From my understanding and the reviews I have read, the pseudo-openness allowed by this modification gave the iPhone an enormous amount of added value – just like the homebrew scene on the PSP. Apple may end up having shot themselves in the foot unless they do something about these bricked iPhones and make headway in releasing some type of viable SDK.

I must say, I am glad I dont work in a store like Target & Best Buy or on the AT&T support lines at the moment.... On a different note, I finally got around to uploading a review of Half life 2 Episode 1 that I wrote a few months ago. This can be found here. I also wrote a brief review about the open source rewrite of the classic Transport Tycoon Delux.